How we’re redefining the traditional retreat experience

Our recent RESET YOU Retreat is changing the conversation about wellness travel

Eat, sleep, yoga, repeat: the traditional retreat experience has been pretty straightforward for the last decade, focusing on giving travellers a health and wellness overhaul in a few short days. But as demand for wellness travel picks up post-COVID, the experiences on offer are becoming more intentional – and at foundher, we’re proud to be leading the change.

In the standard retreat model, you’d book a week away in a beautiful location where you could do yoga and meditation and eat healthy food, returning feeling refreshed – until your regular habits and routines came calling. Before long, you’d be back to your old ways of surviving, and craving another fly-and-flop getaway to break the loop. Sound familiar?

Like many of today’s habits and systems, this typical retreat experience is no longer fit for our modern world, where burnout is reaching epidemic levels and uncertainty has become the norm. Taking a break from that pressurised environment only offers a temporary fix; a bandaid for overwhelm.

What you need is a chance to not only recharge but reset with a curated experience led by industry experts.

Lonely Planet, Conde Nast Traveler and the Global Wellness Institute are among those highlighting the trend towards intentional wellness travel in the post-pandemic era. Vague definitions of healthy holidays no longer fit the bill; whether it’s to boost sleep, embrace menopause or learn new skills, the best wellness getaways are now consciously designed for real and lasting life improvement.

Are you living your best life or your back-up plan?

At foundher, our mission is to equip leaders of change with a toolkit for our modern world, so they can continue to perform at a high level no matter what disruptions life (constantly) throws at them. 

We’re always evolving the work we do with our community and providing tools, frameworks and the latest developments in habits and behaviour to help them design their own unique sustainable rhythm that allows them to show up as their best more often, so they can be someone who does something about that. We believe a sustainable pace is the new foundational high-performance skill – and (re)learning, getting great at constant experimentation and adapting are the new tools for navigating constant change. This is what we offer our community: new ways to gain insights and build recharging habits into their everyday, so they can create a life they don’t need to escape from. 

Similarly, we’re noticing more business owners and executives self-authoring: deciding how they want to grow their capability for long-term, sustainable leadership. They’re seeking an immersive container in which to build these skills. They’re being the change they want to see.

Leadership is a behaviour, not a title

This is why we launched the foundher RESET YOU Leadership Retreat. This five-day experience at SOMA in Byron Bay is rewriting the traditional retreat experience to better answer our modern work and life challenges. 

“The real shift is giving people practical tools that they can practise at the retreat and take home that will change their routines, rituals and habits – not leave them with an aspirational, out-of-reach version of an ‘ideal’ lifestyle that isn’t achievable in a real-life setting,” says Elana Robertson, founder and managing director of foundher.

Simply put, RESET YOU isn’t just about relaxing for a short time, it’s an opportunity to transform for good.

The yoga dome was a beautiful place to practise yoga and meditation each day.

The reset in practice

Our recent RESET YOU Retreat at SOMA was designed to offer a combination of recharging and upgrading. 

Each day followed a relaxed schedule, focused loosely around ‘doing’ in the mornings and ‘being’ in the afternoons. 

The days began with morning movement and reflection led by yoga and meditation teacher Julie Smerdon, where guests were encouraged to expand and reset their beliefs around these practices and make them their own. Then, they’d hold a ‘morning meeting with self’ to discover a new approach to meeting the day. This practice includes a combination of gratitude, a body scan to assess energy levels and a moment to uncover what’s required for the day ahead – rather than being swept up in outside demands that trigger our nervous system into an adrenal response.

Our guests naturally gathered for soul-enriching conversations on the deck at SOMA.

Later in the morning, after a nourishing breakfast, Elana hosted intimate workshops on topics such as vertical development and somatic EQ growth, and shared a new toolkit around using self-awareness to recognise the effects of fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses in our day-to-day and work, and practices that support cooling our nervous system and returning to homeostasis more often.

The workshops were specially crafted by Elana to facilitate deep learning and transformation. Part of this process involves small group activities and fieldwork in order to embed the new information and enhance learning through shared insights and connection – putting the learning into our bodies and learning how it feels.  

Elana led daily workshops centred on emotional intelligence and somatic growth.

“This allows guests to safely practise and experiment with changes while on retreat,” Elana says.

“It’s about training that isn’t just information but invokes transformation and felt change.”

In the afternoon ‘being’ time, guests were encouraged to listen in to what they needed – explore their own ‘soma’ at SOMA, if you will. Whether it was wandering and exploring the grounds, enjoying a massage or infrared sauna, jumping into an ice bath or reading a book, journalling or simply napping, the invitation was to tune into what their mind and body most needed. In the evening, Julie led the guests through a wind-down ritual before bed. 

This gentle flow allowed guests to embrace a new rhythm that they could take home into their everyday lives. But, importantly, the activities were completely optional and our guests were encouraged to join in or sit out as their energy allowed.

“RESET YOU isn’t about giving you a run sheet and agenda that forces you through a generic program,” Elana explains. “It’s highly immersive and somatic, giving you the best opportunity to create changes in habits and behaviours and rewrite unconscious ways of operating.”

Burbury Whole Foods created beautiful banquets for our guests.

Experimental mindset

The partners foundher teamed up with for this retreat created even more opportunities for guests to experiment with a sustainable rhythm and conscious choices that enhance everyday life.

“The first thing we thought of was, ‘how do we support better sleep while they’re at a retreat?’” Elana says. “So, we partnered with SleepHub from Cambridge Sleep Sciences to help our guests to work on resetting their brainwaves for deeper sleep using this cutting-edge device.”

Our partnership with Inner Atlas allowed guests to experiment with adaptogenic tonics to support energy, focus, rest and awareness throughout the five days at SOMA. And Tom and Tash, founders of Burbury Whole Foods, not only provided beautiful organic banquets but inspired guests at every meal with education about the natural synchronicity of seasonal eating, mindful eating for the busy consumer, and the impact of choosing to source food locally.

We also gifted take-home sensory tools such as refreshing Mukti face mists and relaxing music playlists that will inject a touch of SOMA to their daily lives. And we gifted our guests sustainable hemp clothing from ZONE by Lydia Lassila to enhance their comfort during their stay.

“It’s about showing our guests new ways to embrace high-performance – and the modern tools that can help with that – so they can go home redefining what success looks and feels like for them,” Elana explains.

Our happy guests at the end of their reset.

After the reset

Since our RESET retreat wrapped, our guests have continued to share how much the experience meant to them and how they’re already integrating their learnings into everyday life. 

It’s proof that, when curated consciously, intentional wellness travel can be truly transformational. Here’s what one of our guests recently shared:

“It was amazing to be coached by someone of Elana’s calibre … I have been breathing in stressful moments since I left, and trying to self-author when the going gets tough. I keep being mindful not to let life happen to me.”

Our guests have told us that their morning routines are now embedded and they’re already feeling the benefits of regular rituals involving gratitude, reflection and daily planning as they ease back into their normal life.

Best of all, we’re delighted to hear that many of our guests are planning on making RESET YOU part of their annual recharging rhythm. 

Considering joining us at SOMA next year? Here’s what one of our guests wants you to know: 

“Give yourself this gift of recharge. RESET YOU is perfect for people who already know there is a better and more sustainable way but aren’t sure what needs to change to allow it.”

If that resonates, we’d be delighted to introduce you to a new kind of retreat with long-lasting impact in 2023. Discover more and book your reset today.